A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Much attention has focused on offshoring of information technology (IT) services overseas. "Offshoring" of services generally refers to an organization's purchase from other countries of services such as software programming that it previously produced or purchased domestically. IT manufacturing, notably semiconductor manufacturing, has a longer history of offshoring of manufacturing operations. Under the Comptroller General's authority to conduct evaluations on his own initiative, GAO addressed the following questions: (1) How has offshoring in semiconductor manufacturing and software services developed over time? (2)What factors enabled the expansion of offshoring in these industries? (3) As these industries have become more global, what have been the trends in their U.S.-based activities?"

The Computation Directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has four major areas of work: (1) Programmatic Support -- Programs are areas which receive funding to develop solutions to problems or advance basic science in their areas (Stockpile Stewardship, Homeland Security, the Human Genome project). Computer scientists are 'matrixed' to these programs to provide computer science support. (2) Livermore Computer Center (LCC) -- Development, support and advanced planning for the large, massively parallel computers, networks and storage facilities used throughout the laboratory. (3) Research -- Computer scientists research advanced solutions for programmatic work and for external contracts and research new HPC hardware solutions. (4) Infrastructure -- Support for thousands of desktop computers and numerous LANs, labwide unclassified networks, computer security, computer-use policy.

This report highlights the adequate yearly progress (AYP) concept of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The AYP is the standard of eligibility for grants, of which states must implement AYP policies in all public schools and local education agencies (LEAs). The standard primarily utilizes state test scores to measure the school's eligibility for funding, schools that do not meet AYP standard for two or more consecutive years face consequences. Finally, the report tackles the idea of growth models in reference to the AYP.

This report is a comparison of the laws of the United Kingdom and of the United States that govern criminal and intelligence investigations of terrorist activities. Both systems rely upon a series of statutory authorizations: in the case of the United States primarily the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act; in the case of the United Kingdom, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, the Police Act, the Intelligence Services Act. Among other differences, the U.S. procedures rely more heavily upon judicial involvement and supervision, while those of the UK employ other safeguards. The UK procedures afford greater latitude to arrest, detain and supervise suspected terrorists than those available in the United States.

The large-scale computational capabilities at LLNL make it possible to develop seamless connections from processes at the atomic scale to complex macroscopic phenomena such as hydrodynamic instabilities and turbulent mixing. Traditionally, these connections have been made by combining results from different scientific fields. For gases and fluids, atomic and molecular scattering cross sections must first be obtained and incorporated into Boltzmann transport equations. Their solution yields then transport coefficients which are input parameters for the Navier-Stokes equations for fluid dynamics. The latter are solved numerically with hydro-codes. For visco-elastic solids, on the other hand, atomistic simulations must first provide constitutive laws for the mobility and multiplication of dislocations and other crystalline defects. In turn, these laws are utilized to construct meso-scale models for plastic deformation. These models are then incorporated into hydro- and finite element codes to predict the macroscopic behavior of solid materials. Many of these intermediate steps can be bypassed with large-scale molecular dynamics simulations. For this purpose, codes have been developed in which trajectories of atoms or molecules are mapped onto continuum field descriptions for mass density, mass flow, stresses, and for temperature. It is now possible to compare directly and quantitatively atomistic simulations with predictions from …

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At Yucca Mountain, Nevada-the proposed location for a national high-level nuclear waste repository-radionuclides, if released from breached waste storage canisters, could make their way down through the unsaturated zone (where the repository would be located) into the underlying groundwater and eventually back to the biosphere (i.e., where they could adversely affect human health). The compliance boundary, 18 km south of the proposed repository, is defined as the location where a human being using groundwater would be maximally exposed to radionuclides outside of an exclusion zone set around the repository. It is thus important to predict how these radionuclides would be transported by the groundwater flow, and to predict both the concentration of and the rate at which any leaked radionuclides would arrive at the compliance boundary. We recently conducted a study of groundwater flux in the saturated zone through the Crater Flat Group, in a wellbore 15 km south of the proposed repository. The Crater Flat Group, a sequence of ash-flow tuff formations, is laterally extensive beneath the footprint of the proposed repository. Because of its intense fracturing and high permeabilities, the Bullfrog tuff is the primary unit within the Cratei Flat Group through which radionuclides would be transported, as …

This report begins by describing the change in the age distribution of the U.S. population that will occur between 2005 and 2025 and by summarizing the historical data on the labor force participation of older workers. This discussion is followed by an analysis of data from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey on employment and receipt of pension income among persons age 55 and older.

This report provides information about the Status and Associated Issues of Disaster Debris Removal After Hurricane Katrina.Hurricane Katrina produced unprecedented destruction resulting in disaster debris from man-made structures.

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Quantitative gamma spectrometry measurements of uranium frequently require corrections for attenuation by an equipment or container layer and by the uranium bearing material itself. It is common to correct for attenuation using the ''far-field approximation''. Under this approximation, the minimum thickness of equipment or material is used for the correction rather than an average thickness over the detector field-of-view. In reality this aspect of the far-field approximation is really a narrow field-of-view approximation. The price of this simplification is the introduction of a bias. This bias will be investigated in this paper. In addition, there is a distance dependence of the radial response of a detector. This dependence will also be investigated.

The presence of trapped ions in electron storage rings has caused significant degradation in machine performance. The best known way to prevent the ion trapping is to leave a gap in the electron bunch train. The topic of this paper is the dynamics of ions in the field of the bunch train with uneven bunch filling. We consider High Energy Ring (HER) of the PEP-II B-factory. In the first section we summarize mechanisms of the ion production. Then the transverse and longitudinal dynamics are analyzed for a beam with and without gap. After that, the effect of the ions is considered separating all ions in the ring in several groups depending on their transverse and longitudinal stability. The main effects of the ions are the tune shift and the tune spread of the betatron oscillations of the electrons. The tune spread is produced by bunch to bunch variation of the electric field of ions and by nonlinearity of the field. It is shown that the main contribution to the shift and spread of the betatron tune of the beam is caused by two groups of ions: one-turn ions and trapped ions. One-turn ions are the ions generated during the last …

The objective of the work scope covered by this Technical Work Plan (TWP) is to correct and improve the Yucca Mountain Project (YMP) thermodynamic databases, to update their documentation, and to ensure reasonable consistency among them. In addition, the work scope will continue to generate database revisions, which are organized and named so as to be transparent to internal and external users and reviewers. Regarding consistency among databases, it is noted that aqueous speciation and mineral solubility data for a given system may differ according to how solubility was determined, and the method used for subsequent retrieval of thermodynamic parameter values from measured data. Of particular concern are the details of the determination of ''infinite dilution'' constants, which involve the use of specific methods for activity coefficient corrections. That is, equilibrium constants developed for a given system for one set of conditions may not be consistent with constants developed for other conditions, depending on the species considered in the chemical reactions and the methods used in the reported studies. Hence, there will be some differences (for example in log K values) between the Pitzer and ''B-dot'' database parameters for the same reactions or species.

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This report provides a brief overview of the Impact Aid program, including the calculation of Impact Aid payments to local educational agencies (LEA), and an overview of the Base Realignment and Closing (BRAC) recommendations. This is followed by a discussion of the potential effects of the BRAC recommendations on LEAs that will both lose and gain students as a result of the changes. The report concludes with a brief discussion of actions that have been taken by LEAs in anticipation of large influxes of federally connected students.

This report discusses the key issues regarding U.S.-Bangladesh Relations. U.S. policy toward Bangladesh emphasizes support for political stability and democracy; social and economic development; and improvement of human rights. The United States has long-standing supportive relations with Bangladesh and has viewed Bangladesh as a moderate voice in the Islamic world.

This report provides statistics on fatalities during Operation Iraqi Freedom, which began on March 19, 2003, as well as on the number of fatalities since May 1, 2003, plus statistics on those wounded, but not killed, since March 19, 2003.

In Part I, this CRS report discusses the policy on “one China” since the United States began in 1971 to reach understandings with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) government in Beijing. Part II documents the evolution of the “one China” principle as articulated in key statements by Washington, Beijing, and Taipei. The U.S. policy on “one China” has evolved to cover three issues: sovereignty, peaceful resolution, and cross-strait dialogue.